Algolia Community Party in Kyoto - 10 May 2019 Participation Report

I participated here and I will write an article to report back.

What is Algolia?

Seeing is believing!

First of all, please visit the following website and search for more information!

Algolia Community Sample
Sites actually used as Product.
- https://www.bringmeister.de/
- https://8tracks.com/explore/all

Don't all of them return results explosively fast! This is actually powered by SaaS ?

Overview

https://www.algolia.com/

Products to accelerate search and discovery experiences across any device and platform.

Algolia is a SaaS that provides full-text search. When you use full-text search, you generally use something like Elastic Search or Solr on your server to manage it. Once you start using it, you may want features such as 'category selection, facet refinement, highlighting', etc., and may want to develop your own. Aloglia provides such full-text search-related functions as a SaaS service.

The most popular places to use it are medium, which is a blogging service, and Stripe's documentation, which is an online financial statement processing system. For engineers, Docker Hub is also used. It is also officially mentioned as a use case by Firebase. This is surprising.

https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/search?hl=ja

Algolia as a company started in 2012 from France. It is a venture company and they are looking for Japanese engineers.

They have an event for the SaaS community, where Algolia is also a speaker.

https://www.saastr.com/

https://www.saastr.com/watch-the-saastr-masterclass-from-0-to-10m-in-arr-from-algolia-in-paris-video/

What features do you have?

Algolia's Solution Architect, @shinodogg, explained the following features.

Notation distortion when searching
Typing error assistance
Refinement by category and facet
Highlighting of search terms
Personalisation
A/B testing
GEO search
Image search
Audio search

Other search options include the ability to display 'products under 500 yen' when you search for 'cheap'. It can also be used as a chatbot. It can also be used as a chatbot.

The only thing is, it doesn't seem to support Japanese yet, and is currently under development.

How do I use it?

https://github.com/algolia Libraries are provided as OSS. If you want to use it quickly, you can use instantsearch.js.

https://community.algolia.com

You may also find this useful.

Did you know about Algolia?

I knew about it. The first time I heard about Algolia was from a friend from university (id:castaneai). Algolia is a SaaS that is easy to use and highly functional, without the need to build a full-text search system, As a personal developer, I started to be interested in Algolia.

After that, as I wrote in the following article, I was also made a target of OSS Gate.

https://tech-blog.monotaro.com/entry/2018/10/17/115442

I also had time to make some apps that had accumulated on my list of things I wanted to make, Recently, I created the following book management. I use Algolia for searching.

https://github.com/silverbirder/book-store-vue

Why is the venue Hatena Corporation?

Because Hatena's president, id:chris4403, knew @shinodogg from a previous job.

https://mackerel.io/ja/

Hatena also provides a server monitoring service, mackerel, as a SaaS service. I thought it was a strange coincidence that these two people have been involved in similar businesses since leaving their previous jobs.

Pizza was provided at the venue. It was delicious! Thank you for the food!

https://twitter.com/silverbirder/status/1126841269097865216?s=20

Finally.

SaaS is a service offering with its own specialised technology. By using such specialised SaaS rather than developing your own, development and operating costs. If you don't have such specialised technology to begin with, you will have to develop it yourself, which is expensive to learn and requires non-functional requirements, It's expensive to learn and you have to think about non-functional requirements, which is hard.

I think it is an efficient development style in this day and age to "spend time on what needs to be spent and move the rest to SaaS".